It's a repugnant process. It's insulting to people and unnecessary. I'm more in favor of open accountability against previously decided criteria that everyone agrees upon. Light is the greatest disinfectant in nature and also in organizations. If you have real-time information, against the goals you've established together, then people can evaluate their own performance, and you can become a source of help to them.

You talk about the need to treat employees as people rather than things. How do you feel about outsourcing jobs to other countries? Doesn't it treat people as things that are disposable?

If you're up against global competition, you go wherever you can find core competency. Sometimes if you're going to really compete, [outsourcing] will happen. But that doesn't mean you don't constantly do everything you can to invest in your own people and involve them in the decisions. Outsourcing is inevitable, and I don't think it's necessarily treating people like things.

Yes, review season has come again, a process that in the context of the employer-employee relationship *SHOULD* be a process that has both parties actively involved. Sadly, today many corporations, and most Wall Street analysts view employees as a liability - salaries, raises, training and benefits are annoying expenses to be kept to a minimum. This view however is inevitably short sighted – it burns up long term viability by eliminating the fuel, desire, and goodwill for future growth.

"...messages jump out because they are from an address that ends with 'aol.com', the cyberspace neighborhood of parents and children but never of students, hackers, or people who actually work in high-tech."

Neal StephensonCryptonomicon"

I get the oddest emails sometimes. This time it wan't AOL.com (actually now that I think about it, I don't see aol.com anymore as an email suffex - progress perhaps?) but near enough in the "not businesslike " pecking order.

...companies may rely too much on the crutch of layoffs, which just exacerbates the recession. What's worse, many layoffs have dubious value. A Bain & Company study from the early 2000s recession concluded laying people off can be expensive. As the study's authors reported in the April 2002 Harvard Business Review, if you refill a job within six to eighteen months, you lose money on the deal. The drag on earnings, they said, includes; severance packages, temporary declines in productivity or quality, and rehiring and retraining costs that more than offset the short-term wage savings. Badly handled layoffs also destroy morale. To stay strong, to find opportunities to cut costs in smart ways, and to get creative about the future, you'll need everyone on board. So undermining morale may not be a great idea right now. In many cases, there's another way.

“Man the is this. Pays Crime. Clothes mother’s his wears General Secretary the.” He waited five seconds, said with the English accent, “I wear a Stetson now” – and waited two more seconds and said softly, “Wake up.” There was a pause so short it might have been only in Trent’s imagination. The InfoNet Relay station said, “Hello, Boss.”